How much of your day-to-day actvity is happening via instinctive or learned neurology?
It is important to recognise that if everything you did had to go through a complete process of identification, initiation, consideration, planning and execution, you would probably get very little done in a day. In a similar way, a bird can perch, apparently effortlessly, even on a windy day and still manage to sing but at the first perception of threat it will take flight. It’s a good thing most of the time …
Habits and instinctive responses keep things going behind the scenes and allow us many freedoms: but behaviours based on safety can also lead to physical contraction and reductive or simplistic thinking. So – especially when ingrained behaviours cease to serve us – awareness and small changes can also bring a different kind of freedom: the freedom to choose your actions.
This is where the art of play can help. Play – in its most basic form – is the purest of creative thinking: experimentation without fear of failure.
Recently I facilitated a group workshop around stress management in a high pressure profession, where there was a shared feeling that there was no choice in many of the things which people were finding challenging. I asked them what they thought needed to happen.
To start with a list of highly professional responses emerged. These were “the right answers”, learned, generic and taken as stock like” “set better boundaries” and “time management”, “discipline”, “delegate” but without realistic ways to implement as ACTIONS. Professional expectations which were causing a block to new or creative thinking. Asking for alternative ideas resulted in a long, silent pause and almost palpable frustration.
So we all stood up and I invited the group to look at an assortment of small items placed along a windowsill for a minute then share amongst themselves what comes up relating to our theme. A compass, crayons, pebbles, moss, twigs, feathers, a ruler, needle and thread, magnifying glass, matchbox, a bone, a stamp, a bell, a watch, a flower, a photograph of a beach, dice, buttons… etc etc… Within minutes stories and themes emerged as individuals started to talk about what these apparently random items meant to them…
During the conversations that followed (including some dark humour and plenty of laughter) a raft of new ideas and lightbulb moments arose. When the group sat back down the empty paper started to fill…
So when you are stuck, or reacting in a way that you would like to change – pause to ask yourself, “was this instinctive, learned or creative?” And then: “How can I invite myself to think differently or try something new?”.
Trying to “think harder” is more likely to activate your reactive “safety system” whereas offering your brain something more creative invites the problem solving ‘playful’ part of your brain to come on-line. This is where you have a choice.
